Episode 8: Dr. Richard Horowitz

SHOW TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Richard Horowitz is Medical Director of the Hudson Valley Healing Arts Center, an integrative medical centre combining classical and complementary approaches in treating Lyme disease and other tick-borne disorders. He has treated over 13,000 Lyme and tick-borne disease patients in the last 30 years, dedicating his life to helping those with this devastating illness.

In his interview with Bioenergetics Beat Host Heather Gray, Dr. Horowitz details the history, refinement and effect of his dapsone protocol and the short-term use of an antibiotic menu to greatly reduce Lyme and co-infection symptoms and often result in full recovery. He stresses the importance of avoiding mold and metal toxins and maintaining a regimen of proper diet and exercise.

Dr. Horowitz also speaks to the role of meditation in the recovery process and the importance of training the mind to exist ‘in the moment’ without attachment to the past or fear of the future.

Dr. Horowitz is the author of two best-selling books on Lyme disease: “Why Can’t I Get Better? Solving the Mystery of Lyme and Chronic Disease” (2013, St Martin’s Press, NY Times Best Seller), and “How Can I Get Better? An Action Plan for Treating Resistant Lyme and Chronic Disease” (2017, St Martin’s Press, National bestseller). These books incorporate recent scientific advances and explain in detail how healthcare providers can effectively diagnose and treat resistant chronic illness.

Heather Gray: Thank you so much, everyone, for joining us on another awesome episode of Bioenergetics Beat. I’m Heather Gray, a Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner and Certified Bioenergetic Practitioner. And this episode is brought to you today by NIKKI, Unleash the Wellness Within. It’s a non-invasive, easily affordable, and highly effective approach to optimize wellness. It’s a wearable device that puts frequency better-based life in your hands and on your wrist. Make sure to stick around to the very, very end. Well, one, you’re not going to want to miss one second of Dr. Horowitz, like, hello. He’s going to be dropping all kinds of amazing truth and health bombs on us, but we’re going to give away something very special at the very end. So you’ll want to stick around. If you’ve been in the Lyme world at all for even just a minute, you know who he is, but Dr. Richard Horowitz is our special guest today. And we’re going to be diving in all things Lyme and his revolutionary, you know, double-dap zone protocol and all the things that is healing. So welcome everyone. Welcome Dr. Horowitz to the show.

Dr. Richard Horowitz: It’s my pleasure. I’m glad to be here.

Heather Gray: Hey, thank you so much for taking the time. And for those of those who don’t know you, I would love, love, love, because most of us who are in the Lyme world aren’t in it just because we woke up one morning and went, I want to work with Lyme. We usually have a personal story that took us down this path. I would love to hear a little bit about yours.

Dr. Richard Horowitz: So mine is a bit unusual. I would probably say that the reason I ended up in Lyme disease was simply because when I finished my internal medicine training at Mount Sinai, this goes back, I was doing it between 1984 and 1987. I had a choice to either go upstate towards the Poughkeepsie area, Hyde Park, New York, which was about two hours north of where I was living, or my mother wanted to open up a medical practice for me in Bayside, Queens, where I grew up. And at the time, I was studying meditation with one of my Tibetan Buddhist teachers. He was up in Wappinger Falls, which was close to Vassar Hospital in St. Francis, which was up in that area. And when I was finishing my third year residency, I had said to Lama Nourlai, I said, my mother thinks Queens would be great, but I really love it up here with the mountains and the river, I’ll be a country doc. What do you think? And he did what’s called a mo or a divination and said, oh, up here, very good. So it was simply just going to my meditation teacher and just asking him what he thought about where was the best place for me to practice. But of course, I didn’t know at the time when I was moving upstate that I was moving into the largest Lyme endemic area at this point in almost in the United States. So this goes back to 1987. And I started seeing regular internal medicine patients, but the Lyme patients started coming in quite a bit with bullseye rashes, they were sick. 75% roughly of the time that got better with antibiotics, but 25, 30% time they didn’t. And that was when I started going on a medical journey to figure out why these people were chronically ill. And I think the most important part, just to tell you about that part of the journey was what kind of stuck in my mind is when I was finishing my medical training at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium, I was there for seven years doing my training in French, whole nother story that was a blast. I went to Lama Genin Rinpoche, my teacher who gave me refuge in the Buddhist path. And I said to him, what’s the most important thing you want me to know? I’m about to go out into the world as a physician. And he said, Richard, the most important thing is compassion. Put yourself in people’s shoes and do for them what you would want done for yourself. He said, if you do this, everything will go well. So now, fast forward ahead a decade, I’m seeing these chronically ill patients, I’m sending them to infectious disease, they don’t know what’s wrong with these people. I’m sending them to neurology, to cardiology, they can’t find answers. So I remembered the advice of my spiritual teacher that if I was sick, I would want a doctor to kind of do some research and find out why I was ill. And that’s kind of started me on this 35, almost 40 year journey of looking for a long-term solution for this. And I’m happy to basically tell everyone today that I’ve probably come as close to a cure for this disease. You can’t call it cure because you don’t really know if you’ve knocked at every bug. And I don’t think necessarily I have, but a lot of people are going into long-term remission and getting their lives back with the protocol that we’ll discuss today.

Heather Gray: Well, and your wife, correct me if I’m wrong, correct? Also has a Lyme story, which also kind of dug you in deeper into the trenches with this disease, correct?

Dr. Richard Horowitz: Yeah, so Lee, but Lee was sick with Lyme before I met her. It’s not like I got into this because I met my wife and she was sick. She grew up in Long Island, had lots of tick exposure, was in Massachusetts, Colorado. She was sick for a good part of her lifetime. And I like to refer to as my MSIDS gal because all 16 points on the MSIDS map that I’ve developed, every one of them Lee had. And at this point, her health is the best it’s ever been. I mean, she’s about four years since she’s done the double-dose dapsone therapy. So I mean, yeah, she’s in great shape from dapsone. She loved the drug, but she found that the higher dose, the double-dose dapsone was needed to put her into longer-term remission.

Heather Gray: You’re such a fascinating character. Like how many white males in the area that you are? How did you get into studying Buddhism and meditation? Like how amazing is that?

Dr. Richard Horowitz: Well, you know, so growing up as a Horowitz, you can pretty much imagine that it was not exactly Buddhism that was the preferred choice of religion among my parents. I went to Yeshiva when I was young and I was extremely religious. So I, you know, I was speaking to God when I was five, six years old. I had regular conversations with God. Nobody told me you couldn’t. I heard things. I didn’t really question what I was hearing, but I was definitely hearing things when I was young. I, you know, I think that kind of communication was there early. And my parents got divorced when I was very young. And I think some of my psychic connections got cut a little bit from the trauma. But later on in life, you know, it was just kind of like I was missing this deep spiritual connection that I knew as a young child, but I found that Judaism was not providing me easily with Kabbalah training. I wanted the mystical training. I was not interested in just, you know, the classical training. And, you know, so I started studying Hinduism and yoga and was studying that path actually with the yoga sutures of Patanjali for quite a few years with the Transcendental Meditation people and the TM City technique, which I studied in Europe. It was just a natural progression for me because most of us feel a void inside. We feel like there’s something missing and we’re always trying to fill that void with things from the outside. And it’s not always easy when you don’t have a solid spiritual connection. You’re always gonna feel that there’s something missing no matter how much you’re filling up your life because life isn’t permanent, nothing stays the same. That void is going to be there. And I think a lot of people look for a deeper spiritual meaning and connection. And I found with the Tibetan Buddhist teachers specifically from the Kagyu lineage, they were able to provide me with techniques and ways of looking at the world in a way that not only made sense to me, but it was experiential. It wasn’t a question of blind faith. It was a question of, if you’re a scientist, you could actually test out these theories. So if they said to me, do this meditation technique and eventually this will happen. I was able to check it out as a scientist, right? You have to have enough faith to do it, but it’s not blind faith because you get to see experientially what is your direct experience doing these techniques. And when I met these teachers, I mean, they were some of the most amazing, bright, loving, compassionate, funny people I had ever met. And it was kind of like, I don’t know what you’ve been doing but I want to be just like you because you are just great. You’re wise, you’re funny. You know, they had all the qualities that I would have wanted to develop in myself. So I got to meet a lot of, actually quite a few enlightened teachers who are recognized by many of the spiritual groups as being fully awakened. And I was very fortunate in Belgium to have met, I mean, I don’t know, 20, 25 of these teachers probably came through the Brussels Center. And I studied with these teachers in the South of France when I’d go on meditation retreats. My story is definitely a bit different but it comes from this kind of strong spirituality I had as a child that kind of got cut off with trauma early in my life and I wanted to reconnect. And it was just a natural flow to determine how do I get back to that state of knowing whether you call it, you know, God, Christ mind, Buddha mind, God mind, words you want to use for it, the enlightened mind. It’s pretty much, in my opinion, all the same state of consciousness. How do you get there? So that also brought me on a 40 plus year journey to discover how to do it. And, you know, I integrate meditation and those kinds of things in my practice because a lot of people who come to me, they’ve had trauma. They have difficulty with their mind. You know, a lot of people come to me and say, Doc, I’ve lost my mind. And I go, well, have you ever found your mind? That of course stops them in their tracks because that’s a typical Buddhist thing. Like, where is the mind? Does it have color? Does it have form? You know, it’s part of the Mahamudra training. But in any case, it’s been very good to integrate this because it gives me a way to connect with people, not just from my own trauma that I’ve had, because many people I call the walking wounded, a lot of people have had trauma and need help with it, but also for the fact that I can teach them some of these ways of working with their mind that is so important in chronic Lyme disease when these people are suffering. Because a lot of them are living in the future, they’re living in fear, or they’re living in the past with what’s happened, but they’re not living in the present. They’re not looking at all the potential that they have. And, you know, fortunately this DAPSONE protocol is turning out to be so effective in the vast majority of people. And this last article I just published, which now addresses Bartonella, which was the chronic co-infection, truthfully, I think making most of these people chronically ill apart from Babesia and the MSIDS factors. Now that I figured out part of this puzzle, it’s kind of like, well, people really have a shot now with short-term protocols to get on and get their life back in order. So it’s kind of, it’s a very exciting time.

Heather Gray: It’s such an exciting time. Like I said, I’ve always known about you. I’ve had, you know, Lyme disease undiagnosed for a very long time. So I’ve always known about you. But then when I heard you spoke on the Lyme Summit, and you brought in some of these Buddhists and the meditation talk and the trauma talk, and then you talked about your book, you know, about sustainability and the planet. And I just was like, holy cow, like I fell in love with you even deeper. And then you did a talk recently with Project Lyme with Ali and your wife, and I totally fell in love with her. And I guess I’ve been looking forward to this talk for a couple weeks now, because you don’t hear a whole lot of people who are bringing in the whole everything, right, from spirituality to meditation to trauma to then looking at the physical, the doctor side, and then also recognizing that the planet has also got, you know, has something to do with us healing, and we have to look at the whole picture.

Dr. Richard Horowitz: Right, well, I mean, the reason I wrote Starseed Revolution, The Awakening a couple of years back, and I started this book, by the way, like in 2018, before the climate was really even being discussed, is that the reason we’re having part of the tick-borne epidemic right now is from the climate. So as the planet is warming, the reproductive rates of insects, ticks, mites, fleas, mosquitoes, the reproductive rate goes up as the planet warms. And that’s why, you know, back in 2021, the CDC said we have almost a half a million cases of Lyme per year. Alison DeLong and others, it’s always over 2 million PTLDS cases. I mean, the numbers are much, much higher. These are underestimated. But even last year, BMG Global Health said that 14.5% of the global population has now had exposure to Lyme. That’s one in seven people. And that’s from the climate. So when you look at the environmental toxins that are now coming, you know, the heavy metals and the mold toxins, and of course, all the heat stress and things that’s going on from the climate, and then you combine it with these tick-borne infections, you’ve got a perfect trifecta at this point where a lot of people are coming down with chronic fatiguing, musculoskeletal, neuropsychiatric, cardiovascular illnesses, and they’re going from doctor to doctor going, I don’t know why I’m sick and nobody can figure it out. And, you know, that’s the beauty of the Emsens model. And by the way, in Starseeds, since you were talking about the book briefly, what people don’t realize that I put in that book, when I was looking for climate solutions, I had to come up with an idea that no one else would, because I realized that we only have a finite amount of time in this decade to turn this around. And I made certain predictions in the book, by the way, which have already come true. One of my favorite ones, by the way, if you read the book, is there, the chapter headings usually have a quote, and one of the quotes was by Carl Tuckerson. You can figure out who this is if you just reverse the letters. And it said, loose tweets sink fleets. Now this was written a couple of years back before Tucker Carlson had released his wrong tweets, right, about what happened with Fox and everything. So when you go back to the book, you’ll actually see that when I was downloading this book, I was in a meditative state, by the way, downloading this entire 450 page manuscript. I put in the book, the Mahamudra teachings I received about the nature of mind, because what I discovered is if 1% of the global population were to do this meditation, there’s a way of actually using the inner power of consciousness to help change external reality, because there is no inner outer. This is a dualistic perception. So what I don’t think people realize is when Master Dorje is teaching the young master, like you would in Star Wars, in this book, these are actually spiritual teachings I received from Trungpa Rinpoche, who is one of the greatest spiritual masters. He taught the Dalai Lama meditation. I trained with him for 10 years with Lee, and his teachings are in this book. And if kids were to use these teachings, because their minds, there’s so much climate grief and anxiety that’s now happening, it’s overlapping the trauma just from what’s happening with Lyme. So, you know, it’s really not that unusual if you think about the mind, body, emotional, spiritual connection, you really have to address all of them. And we have to address the climate to leave a healthy place for, you know, our future generations. Absolutely.

Heather Gray: me goosebumps like five times so far and almost brought me to tears once. So this is, like I said, I knew this was going to be a good show. This was an awesome place to take a quick pause for commercial. Don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right back. And like I said, make sure to stick around to the end for our giveaway. Stay tuned.

Heather Gray: awesome. Welcome back, everybody. Hey, let’s dive in deeper. We, he keeps, you know, uh, talking about the double dapsone, um, treatment that he’s come up with. Let’s let’s dive a little deeper into, into that. Why don’t we.

Dr. Richard Horowitz: Sure, so about seven or eight years ago, coming out from Kim Lewis at Northeastern and Stanford, Dr. Jay, they were all discovering that Lyme is a persister bacteria.

Heather Gray: That’s so exciting. I wish I was going to ILADS this year, hopefully next year. I know Allie is going for the first time ever this year, so I’m excited she gets to go.

Heather Gray: You just dropped like so much hope and amazingness. And dealing with the three things that you say need to have to be in place. I mean, really, if you know these things about a person beforehand, you should be able to get them up to a decent dose to where then they can handle treatment, correct?

Dr. Richard Horowitz: Correct. Correct. I mean, so the thing is, is that where it gets a little bit tricky with dapsone is if a woman’s starting at a hemoglobin of around 12, right? Considering that you can see five, even sometimes six point drops in hemoglobin, it doesn’t happen often, but maybe one out of a hundred, it’s going to happen. You have to be able for someone who starts at a lower hemoglobin, you got to follow the CBCs more carefully. You may have to do more pulsing of dapsone. You may not be able to get in a month of double dose dapsone at a hundred twice a day before doing the six day high dose dapsone pulse for BART. But the beauty of it is for someone that starts at a lower hemoglobin, you can try building them up. Like I just had a woman who was a little bit iron deficient. She was about 11.9 and she went for an iron infusion. She’s on B12 and now her hemoglobin is like 13.5. So now she’s able to do the dapsone pulse. She’s already done double dose dapsone. She now needs to do the six day pulse because she’s got BART. So the beauty is, is you can wait a little bit to get the hemoglobin up, right? And address it or just shorten the pulses because the, the answer for this disease, and I think everyone’s been looking for hope and what really is the answer. The answer is biofilms, pulsing and persister drugs. If you don’t open up the biofilms, if you don’t use a persister drug like dapsone, and by the way, this regimen uses four persister drugs. Rifampin is a persister drug. Dapsone is a persister drug. Pyrazinamide is a persister drug and methylene blue is a persister drug. And the beauty of methylene blue is that John Hopkins published a few years back that Rifampin and Zithromax with methylene blue hits BART persisters in culture. We just didn’t know how, what’s the dose of methylene blue you have to use. And it turned out that the highest dose of 300 twice a day is the most effective for Bartonella. And it also keeps down the side effects of methemoglobin with dapsone. So two thirds of the people who did the high dose dapsone, their methemoglobin was below 5%. It was only a few patients that were like 8%, 9%. The highest I think was 17 or 18. Well, you’re not going to feel well at that dose. You’ll have a headache. You’ll be short of breath. Your lips may be a little blue, but it’s not a dangerous level. It’s annoying. So I will push people through the other side. It’s only if the methemoglobin is greater than 20%, I’ll stop it, but it hasn’t happened in ages. So, you know, I’ve designed the protocol by adjusting the methylene blue dosage and folic acid doses. People are on over 300 milligrams of folic acid to stop the dapsone induced anemia and the hematological side effects of dapsone. So when doctors freak out about the side effects of dapsone, what they’re not realizing is when you read about the side effects, that was in leprosy patients who were never taking the doses of folic acid and iron and B12 that I’m using to support the anemia and the white cell counts. So really the protocol has become as safe as it can possibly be. And in general, it’s been highly effective in even some of the most resistant patients. And what’s come out by the way, anyone who has got what it showed up in this article is if you’re immune deficient with chronic variable immune deficiency and you have severe neuropathy and severe POTS dysautonomia and severe neuropsychiatric symptoms, OCD, depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, it is highly likely you have Bartonella. And that was an unknown factor. That’s new in this article. We know that Lyme can cause these things, but what showed up is the people that had multiple species of Bartonella and multiple species of Babesia, these were the sickest patients. And these were the ones that had the worst immune deficiency, neuropsychiatric issues, autoimmune neuropathy, regular neuropathy. That’s almost how you can identify Bart now in these people apart from broad spectrum testing, because there’s at least 18 pathogenic species of Bart that can make people sick. So you have to use a Bartonella immunoblot and a Bart fish from Igenix to do the screening. I have no financial issues with Igenix. We’re just friends. They don’t give me any money for touting them. They’re just one of the best labs that’s out there. If you can get to Galaxy for their DD-PCR, their direct droplet PCR, God bless, do it. I just can’t do it in New York. But you want to use Vibrant Labs, a broad spectrum of labs to check for Bart, for Lyme, for Babesia, as well as other tick-borne co-infections. But once you’ve seen Bart is there, these six-day dapsone pulses with high-dose methylene blue, this seems to be the most effective solution for Bart, which was the biggest co-infection, followed by Babesia, that was making people sick. And in some of these cases, roughly 20-30%, the Babesia even gets better with this protocol, but we still need better Babesia drugs. But we’re getting close. Every year, there’s more and more hope for the Lyme community.

Heather Gray: I, yeah, again, goosebumps at the toe. I was, we have just a little bit more time. I would love for you to, to touch on, you brought in the trauma piece and you brought in the meditation and trying to teach your patients, you know, how to get better control of your mind. Can you go in a little deeper on some of the techniques that you use with that?

Dr. Richard Horowitz: Oh, sure, so the thing about it is that most people who’ve been chronically ill, I think one of the worst fears that they have is that they’re really never gonna get better and that they’re gonna be living this way for the rest of their life. And that kind of anxiety and fear, I think is something that would be common in anyone with a chronic illness, where you go into the Lyme space and there’s so much controversy about what works and what doesn’t work, et cetera, et cetera. So what I teach people regarding has to be proper diet, you gotta get off sugar, you gotta get off alcohol, most people need to be off gluten, dairy.

Heather Gray: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, say that again louder for the people in the back.

Dr. Richard Horowitz: Right, so you need for your diet, first of all, diet, highly important anti-inflammatory diet, sugar, wheat, dairy, look at your allergic foods, do a 95 IgG food profile, see if you have mast cell disorder, look at histamine, chromogranin A, tryptase, prostaglandin D2. Your allergic foods will really make this worse, so your diet has to be cleaned up. You need some form of gentle exercise, doesn’t have to be a lot, but 20 minutes of a gentle walk per day and getting to sleep. So diet, exercise, and sleep, those are really essential when you’re gonna be doing these type of protocols. Now,

Dr. Richard Horowitz: If you look at the MSIDS map and you, let’s say you’ve screened through all the points and you’ve gone through, you know, do I have allergies? Do I have nutritional deficiencies? Do I have mold? And you’ve done all of that. The thing that needs to be addressed ultimately is how your mind is working with your body and what are your beliefs about yourself and when.

Dr. Richard Horowitz: them that they are bad people and they do not deserve to get better. There’s nothing further, obviously, from the truth. I have to address in this population of people that you have to work with your mind in a way that you have to calm the mind, be in the present moment. Don’t live in the past where all of the trauma has been, but don’t live in the future where the fear and the anxiety is. Live in the present moment. It’s really very simple. I train them in meditation techniques, and I do this by the way. I really advise people who’ve had some form of PTSD, and by the way, this is most of us living on the planet these days with whatever your life is. You need to do dynamic neural retraining, DNRS, the GUPTA technique, the AIR, amygdala insular retraining. You need to reprogram and rewire some of this PTSD in the brain. It’s really important, especially if you have vagal dysfunction with POTS dysautonomia. You also want to learn to work with your mind, to look at your mind and to work with it, and to calm the mind, because when the mind is agitated and you’re living in the future, it’s very difficult for you to be in a place where the healing is going to-

Dr. Richard Horowitz: with loving kindness and compassion that you are gonna be of greatest benefit whatever comes out of this meditation.

Dr. Richard Horowitz: You don’t have to sit cross-legged if you can’t. Your back is straight. You can sit in a chair. Your hands, your right hand is on your left, gently resting on your lap. The eyes are open at a 45 degree angle looking downward. The tongue is to the roof of the mouth. It connects the front and the back channels and it helps with the saliva. And the chin is tucked in just slightly, a little bit like a hook downward. And you stay in this stable position with your eyes open and you do the first technique, which is calm abiding, Sine or Samatha meditation. Don’t follow thoughts of the past. Don’t follow thoughts of the future. Don’t follow thoughts of the present. Just rest the mind naturally as it is. Have your awareness, be aware of your awareness, like your mind is literally aware of your mind. You’re turning your attention inward. But you’re focusing, for example, on your breath. You need a focus to be able to have some level of concentration while you’re relaxing non-distractedly. So the first technique of calm abiding is non-distraction. You have to learn to not distract your mind because the mind is like a wild elephant where the thoughts take you all over the place in the past or the future, but most people do not live in the present moment. So when you’re following the breath, you can start with three breaths, in breath, hold it, out breath. You just watch your mind, but you keep attention on the breath gently with three breaths. And if you focus, if you’re noticing, you’re following the three breaths and you’ve succeeded, go to seven breaths. Inward, hold, outward. In the Buddhist tradition, they will do it also with the OM AH HUNG where the in-breath is the OM. You hold it in the AH, you exhale on the HUNG. But for most people, you’re just watching the breath naturally. You don’t try and breathe a certain way. If you get to seven breaths, undistractedly watching your breath, go to 21. The point is build up slowly to have some level of non-distraction in the present moment. Once you have non-distraction and your mind is relatively stable, you can then learn Vipassana insight meditation. So when the thoughts arise, oh my God, I’m never gonna get better. Oh my God, this disease, the pain is horrible. You then look at the mind and the nature of thoughts, the nature of emotions, the nature of mind itself, that if this thought of fear is so real of that I’m never gonna get better with the anxiety, you look at your mind and you ask, well, if the thought and the emotion is so real, where does it come from?

Dr. Richard Horowitz: Where does it go? And the empty nature of emotions. Now, what does that mean? So if you look at your mind, the I that is experiencing pain, I am suffering, I feel pain and suffering. If you look for the I, where is that I? You’ll notice when you look at your mind to find the I, you’ll never be able to find it. The mind has no color and the mind has no form. Just look at your own mind.

Dr. Richard Horowitz: you’ll never find anything. And it’s not because you’re not looking properly. It’s because the mind is empty by nature. So you can’t say that the mind exists because it ultimately has no color and form, but you can’t say that the mind doesn’t exist because it’s the ultimate nature, of course, of our experience right now. The truth is somewhere between dualism, good, bad, happy, sad, man, woman, you’ve got to get into this transcendental state of non-conception. So ultimately, after you’ve constantly looked at the mind and thoughts and emotions that arise and you notice, you can find anything. They have no color, they have no form. They arise almost like magically in a dream. The minute you notice it, you rest your mind non-distractedly in this open, clear, empty space, which is ultimately your own enlightened mind. And the final technique, ma mudra, is simply integrating non-distraction, non-conception to non-conceptual state and non-meditation where there is no effort. You cannot have any effort. This is basically just enough effort to stay awake and aware with a bright mind looking at the mind, looking at itself. If you do this long enough, and by the way, these techniques are in both of my books. The last chapter of Why Can’t I Get Better and How Can I Get Better has these meditation techniques for those who want to review, but these come directly from my Tibetan masters and they’re highly effective. And what they’ve taught is that if you do it and have the direct experience yourself, you will progress on the path and you will see for yourself, there is definitely more calm, a sense of calmness, a sense of connection, a sense of peace. And you’ll realize that your own innate suffering that we do to ourselves all the time, there’s a way for you to help yourself, right? Because it’s a very difficult journey having chronic Lyme and co-infections. And this is just one more tool along the way and also helps you to reestablish your spiritual connection no matter what your religious context is of how you were brought up, these type of techniques are not religious. They are just working with the mind itself, but it can allow you to have a deeper connection, right? However it is you connect, right? With your own sense of spirituality. So I find that it’s a very useful way of kind of connecting with people and teaching them so that it’s more of this mind, body, spirit, emotional connection for full body holistic healing.

Heather Gray: Absolutely. Hey, we’ve come to the shameless plug area of the time of the show. Where can people find you and find out more information about your books?

Dr. Richard Horowitz: So my website is www.cangetbetter.com. Love that. And that will have my books and some of the publications. But most of the time, if you want to follow me, it’s on Facebook. I will post usually new articles and ideas about Lyme and it’s Dr. Richard Horowitz. And that’s where usually you’ll find updates for whatever’s going on in the tick-borne space or environmental toxins. That’s usually where I’ll post most of my updates.

Heather Gray: Absolutely incredible. Thank you for sharing everything that you did. I, like I said, I knew this was going to be a blast and you did not disappoint. Thank you so much. Make sure you go to weareNIKKI.com backslash podcast and enter in bio beats for 10% off your very own NIKKI. And because we really love our customers, we like to show our appreciation, we’re actually going to give away a NIKKI on every episode. So make sure to head over to the show notes to learn how to enter to win.

Heather Gray: Hey there, want to give a big shout out to all the winners in October. We have Trudy, we have Gary, and we have Karen Cunningham. Hey, so if you want to hear your full name now announced on the podcast, make sure to put your full name when you sign up for a free Mickey at the end of every episode, but want to congratulation to our winners. Thank you. Enjoy and everybody else. Make sure to have a healthy day. Stay tuned.

Frequently Asked Questions:

What are the key challenges in diagnosing and treating tick-borne diseases?

Tick-borne diseases, a specialty of Dr. Richard Horowitz, a board-certified internist, pose unique challenges due to their complex symptoms and overlap with other chronic illnesses. His approach at the integrative medical center emphasizes the importance of accurate diagnosis, particularly in suspected cases of Lyme disease.

How does the Diseases Educational Foundation contribute to understanding chronic diseases like Lyme?

The Diseases Educational Foundation, with experts like Dr. Horowitz, plays a crucial role in advancing the knowledge and treatment of Lyme disease. Their efforts focus on educating both the medical community and the public about the complexities of chronic diseases.

What is the connection between chronic fatigue syndrome and Lyme disease?

Chronic fatigue syndrome is often seen in conjunction with chronic illnesses such as Lyme disease. Dr. Horowitz, through his work with the international Lyme and chronic diseases society, highlights the need for comprehensive treatment strategies to address these interconnected conditions.